People Who Wait In Glass Houses Should Throw Lots And Lots Of Stones
Here's a one question quiz for you today. Friday night's trip to Soho's Apple Store "Genius Bar" was A) a colossal waste of time , as in "on the seventh day God rested" B) a platform for dramatic self-discovery regarding fear and loathing C) a painless and productive episode D) Both A and B.
"D", you say? You know me too well. Collect your prize money, go directly to the final square, get out of jail free.
With Toast the Dead iPod festering in its techno-rot in the dark recesses of my manbag, I put aside all non-existent social obligations Friday night to schlep down to uber-trendy Soho for much needed technical assistance. The Apple Store was a sprawling complex of modernism that doubled as my own private chamber of horrors. Throngs of razer-thin hipster beauties formed lines which bisected other lines that eventually led to the tail ends of originating lines, which must have magnetically cued into a fifth dimensional vortex that specialized in the swallowing of patient hipsters. The lines spiraled up free-standing glass staircases and across narrow glass bridges which overcasted the main floor of mirrored glass, pulsating with mindfuckery that drew nausea and vertigo from those with weaker constitutions (like myself). Clusters of shelves housed overpriced accessories which were scrutinized by the forbearing flocks; my ears clogged with gimmicky buzz-words as hipsters vouched for the individual merits of each displayed item.
For those of us that needed a breather from line-waiting, the movie screen of a small ampitheater on the top level happily enticed us to sit back and enjoy the best of Macintosh's masturbatory advertising warfare: Black Eyed Peas' resident slutbag Fergie and one of her dreadlocked cohorts taking time off from their world-improving artistry to candidly testify their near-sexual love for Mac products; a digitized Gandalf clubbing a CGI orc with a white cartoon stick whilst drawing the semen from the ballsacks of all gamer nerds in attendance; and of course the ubiquitous dancing Mac silhouettes, dropping their dope moves like nobody's bid-niss to the entirety of a U2 single with the glistening ivory of their iPod wires flailing against the backdrop of the shadow dancers' onyx frames. Time ceased to be and waiting named the game, but commercial endorsement rang thunderously throughout the glass structure like the trumpets of apocalyptic angels.
For the privilege of standing on the Genius Bar line for an hour and a half with my broken product in tow, I had to first place an online reservation to cater to the stringent schedules of the presiding "Geniuses". Seeing my name finally appear on the service screen might've produced the same feeling that a pending heart donor recipient gets when when the hospital phones in confirmation of a newly-arrived organ. The visible row of attending Geniuses were clearly hired by the regionally-savvy Apple management for their technical prowess as much as their resemblance to CK1 models, or moreso perhaps to a high-Elven council. My own eventual attendant could've easily been Orlando Bloom's understudy in an off-Broadway androgynous theatre piece directed by Gregg Araki: piercing blue eyes, golden locks, jutting ribcage, armed with a liquid smile and a voice soaked in honey.
This shimmering Genius proved to be a model of calmness, kindness, wisdom, and eventually utter uselessness. The hardware of my iPod was shot to shit, and the only way to satisfy my loss would be its replacement. But since a Hewlett-Packard insignia was emblazoned on its hindside, the replacement could not be made at the Apple Store, a marketing snafu that even the Elrond of Apple Geniuses could not surmount. This particular Genius could not even tell me what Hewlett-Packard's procedure was for product replacement. From beyond its techno-grave, the soul of Toast the Dead iPod took to laughing at that moment.
I descended the glass staircase in the horrible, despairing realization that I have never experienced such a crushing waste of time in my entire existence. Even my everlong wait on the gas man last month produced an eventual result. Here I was, fleeing a glass house of existential nightmare with nothing but the little slip of a broken machine that I walked in with. Murphy's Law had sucker-punched me, and I am back to square one.
Fucking iPods. You love them, and they leave you. And you will not find comfort in your neighborhood's corporatized hyper-modern glass tower teaming with lollygagging indiesprites. You will not find comfort anywhere. Despair, mortals, despair...